With Keir Starmer at Nato, the hospital pass of this week’s PMQs was handed instead to Angela Rayner. The welfare row is tearing apart the Labour party, with more than 120 MPs now committed to voting against the changes to disability benefit next Tuesday. In such circumstances, the obvious choice to fill in for Kemi Badenoch was the shadow chancellor Sir Mel Stride – the man who had previously held the work and pensions brief from 2022 to 2024.
Given Labour’s woes, today was always going to be a difficult day for Rayner. Sir Mel certainly made it so, opening with a decent crack about her recent leaked memo to Rachel Reeves. Welcoming Rayner to her place, Stride declared, ‘we share many things – not least that we both viscerally disagree with the Chancellor’s tax policy.’ He followed it up with six crisp questions on welfare and tax, pivoting neatly halfway through to asking whether, if the government could not get its savings through next Tuesday, Rayner could rule out Reeves coming back for more tax rises.
Naturally Rayner could not give that assurance. Sporting a pair of glasses at PMQs for the first time, she gave a somewhat halting, fumbling performance that seemed rather muted compared to her usual vim and vigour. After confirming the only meaningful domestic story of the day – that next Tuesday’s welfare vote will still go ahead – the deputy PM spent most of her answers talking about the record of the ‘last Conservative government’. The lacklustre Labour faces behind her suggests they fear they are now living through a rerun of the Tory years.
The lacklustre Labour faces behind her suggest that they fear they are now living through a rerun of the Tory years
Rayner’s remarks about the Welfare Bill were neither disloyal nor effusive; scripted but not wavering. Her own personal feelings about the Bill might differ to those of the official No. 10 ‘line’ – but she did well not to betray them in the course of the half-an-hour session. She did perk up later in the session and managed even to get a good joke in. ‘The Leader of the Opposition said she was going to get better week-on-week’, Rayner said. ‘She already has in the last two weeks by not turning up.’
Yet, that aside, there was precious little for the government benches to cheer. That was perhaps why the Tories, for arguably the first time this year, sounded notably more boisterous and cheered than their Labour opponents opposite. Towards the end, Calvin Bailey tried to get into his most pompous Tufton Bufton role by criticising comments made by Reform’s Richard Tice about the base commander of RAF Brize Norton. However crass the comments may have been, they were hardly – as Angela Rayner said in her reply – ‘even worse’ than the £30 million of estimated damage inflicted by Palestine Action.
That exchange summed up Labour’s day: flailing around and missing the point. Both Keir Starmer’s afternoon press conference and the ever-growing band of rebels means that today’s session will not live long in the memory. But it was a good day at the office for Sir Mel, at a time when some Tories are growing increasingly uneasy about their party’s future.
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